As a newspaper journalist, it’s hard not to take The Paper personally, especially when the opening credits sequence features newspapers being tossed into bins, taped to shop windows and being used as food wrapping. Ouch.

But the creators of The Paper – the ambitious and very funny spin-off of the US version of The Office – are here to reassure me.

“We love your profession!” says Greg Daniels, who is sitting next to Michael Koman in Los Angeles, where they are speaking over Zoom.

Daniels is TV comedy royalty, a master of the mockumentary who adapted the UK Office for the US and created Parks and Recreation, while Koman is a former Saturday Night Live writer who co-created the absurd advice show Nathan For You.

The Paper is their first project together, a gamble that counts on the long-standing love audiences have for both versions of The Office, and their fondness for comedy and community. (Also watching between their fingers will be a whole generation of journalists with PTSD over the shrinking of their profession.)

“The original show [The Office], to me, was the highlight of my professional life,” says Daniels. “It was such a great, fun experience, and it turned out so well, and I had such a good time with the cast, and felt so protective of the cast, that I never wanted anything that we did to reflect poorly on the original.

“So it took years before I felt like the show had really achieved a pretty bulletproof status in people’s opinions. And some of the actors I worked with, they were like, ‘Don’t sweat it. Why are you being so anxious about it?’”

Daniels felt the same nerves when he developed the UK Office into the US series, but this time he decided not to sweat it and take the leap. “There’s always going to be people that want to show how much they love the first thing by not liking the second thing,” he says. “And you have to keep going or there won’t be any new art made.”

The Paper is set in the EOTU – the Extended Office Television Universe – where the same documentary crew who filmed Michael Scott and his Dunder Mifflin employees have now turned their attention to a local newspaper, the Toledo Truth Teller, in America’s midwest. Both shows also share a character, Oscar (played by Oscar Nunez), but apart from the office setting, that is where the similarities end.

Where Dunder Mifflin never really had ambitions beyond paper supply, the Toledo Truth Teller used to be a grand publishing company with more than 1000 staff, including foreign correspondents. It’s now been reduced to a handful of staff, who fill the print edition with whatever wire copy they can afford. Their website meanwhile, TTT Online, is filled with celebrity stories and whatever will get clicks.

“I had heard a report about ghost newspapers, which is when the newspaper in a community is bought by an outside company, they get rid of the reporters, and they just use wire service articles, and then they sell ads,” says Daniels. “And it looks like the community still has a newspaper, but it really doesn’t, because they’re not covering anything locally. And it seemed like an interesting story, the world of journalism seemed like a type of workplace that had all new questions and ethical dilemmas.”

When Daniels pitched it to Koman, he didn’t mention it was an Office spin-off, but Koman already liked the idea of a documentary crew at a “smallish newspaper struggling to stay afloat … [and it was] the kind of work where people are showing up and they have something very personal invested in it, there’s something romantic about it.”

That is certainly the attitude of the Toledo Truth Teller’s new editor Ned Sampson (played by Domhnall Gleeson). Ambitious with a keen sense of fairness – as a young boy, he never wanted to be Superman, he wanted to be Clark Kent – Ned wants to take the newspaper back to basics with local, fact-based reporting. Standing in his way is the TTT’s former editor, Esmerelda (played by an outstanding Sabrina Impacciatore from season two of The White Lotus), a flamboyant Italian who used to be on Married At First Sight.

“There was a lot more imagining what kind of person would be attracted to print journalism, and what is his argument for why print journalism is so important,” says Daniels. “And what kind of person would participate in these more clickbaity things, and how do they justify that to themselves? And we realised that they are very opposite people, and that it’s a cool clash, because they’re always going to see the world differently.

“At one point, Ned talks about the pluses of print. And he really likes the fact that when you print something, it’s there for the world to see. And if you made a mistake, they can find it years later. And Esmeralda, of course, is way more liking the idea that if you make a mistake, you can change it, and nobody notices.”

And while The Paper is, on one level, a ruthless expose of journalism today, it’s also a love letter to an industry. The first place I worked at was a small, independently owned newspaper in country NSW, where I did everything from police and local council reporting, to sport, local shows and getting firecrackers thrown at me while interviewing the rugby league team during their Mad Monday celebrations (true story). The stories weren’t huge, but they kept the town connected.

“One of the biggest things is just a central source of information in a community,” says Koman. “It gives people something to talk about, and it just makes you feel more connected to your hometown, or wherever you’re living. The information doesn’t have to be huge, it doesn’t have to be some sort of political scandal. You could be reading about a new cafeteria that’s going in at the hospital. You could be reading about a new restaurant that’s opening. Just to think, ‘I’m going to learn about what’s going on where I live, I want to know’, it’s healthy.”

The Paper streams on Binge from September 4.

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